I don't agree that those tools can only make trivial games. Not GameMaker, at least. I've seen several very impressive project, when I was younger and played with it a lot.

Ther are some indie game devs who make quite good games with game maker. Good enough that they sell well enough to make a living from it or at least some income.

Casual games? Most likely yes, but not every gamer is hardcore. There are a lot of people who like some easy entertainment, but don't want to invest a lot of time to learn a game, train their reactions, wade through equipement/item catalogs, consult web sites with calculators and optimizers ... but - just want to be entertained for a while.

Game Maker is IMO a good tool to make games which are just that - entertaining passtimes. And I want to avoid any negative connotation with that. It's IMO what games have always been about, and is maybe more "core" to a game than anything else.

I used to use Game Maker, and I can say, I loved it. I had no clue how to do any programming, and I mean, I couldn't even understand LUA (on roblox). So when I found Game Maker it helped me learn how to program.

Now, since I have started using Java, I feel that GameMaker is very limiting. I don't want to use it for my main tool. However, it does make it take a much shorter time to finish a game using Game Maker. For example, My brother made a game in one day using game maker, and it took me an entire week to get my own java port working.

Game Maker can be very powerful for different reasons than java can, but you need to know how to use it.

Looks like a visual basic style language. Wouldn't a java-esque language or libgdx be more your style cas?

Actually I love BASIC, but by whatever accident for the last 15 years I've been using C-style syntax.

What I want is Mario to make Jack work properly and get lots of people working on it! Then we could use any language we wanted if it had a bytecode compiler. Or maybe LLVM does this already. I dunno, it's all entrenched in Linux bollocks. Oh wait! Monkey already works! Etc.

Looks like a visual basic style language. Wouldn't a java-esque language or libgdx be more your style cas?

Actually I love BASIC, but by whatever accident for the last 15 years I've been using C-style syntax.

What I want is Mario to make Jack work properly and get lots of people working on it! Then we could use any language we wanted if it had a bytecode compiler. Or maybe LLVM does this already. I dunno, it's all entrenched in Linux bollocks. Oh wait! Monkey already works! Etc.

Cas

Makes sense, but porting languages sucks. especially since you could spend that time improving jack. but I see your point. a bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush.

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